What on earth is this trash website? For a supposedly enlightened community, HN sure seems to happily upvote low quality clickbait headlines that are barely accurate.
Here are some references:
- https://patents.google.com/patent/US3948485
- https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/19/patagonias-phi...
Tom Frost was a Stanford-trained engineer who worked with Chouinard to innovate on ice axes, crampons, pitons, and yes the Hexentric.
Royal Robbins was another big name in early Yosemite climbing and he started the eponymous outdoor clothing company.
The Lowe brothers were well-known climbers in 60s and 70s and invented the internal-frame backpack and the modern padded outdoor camera bags, with their companies Lowe Alpine and Lowepro.
Ray Jardine was an aerospace engineer who invented the spring loaded cam so he could protect the first 5.13 climb in Yosemite. He later invented a lot of the ultralight backpacking gear and techniques that are popular now (tennis shoes, tarps, quilts, etc) which he detailed in a guidebook to the Pacific Crest Trail.
Not all these folks were in on the smuggler plane of course but yeah there was a ton of invention and innovation that came out of early climbing.
I think my favourite Yvon Chouinard/Tom Frost story is from the dawn of the Hexentrics path of innovation. They came to realize that pitons, which was their cash cow, was damaging rock. So they innovated against themselves and changed climbing!
That's the hacker of my dreams - they're so driven by moving their passion forward that they'll innovate against themselves. :)
Full story here: https://www.metoliusclimbing.com/metolius-origins.html
On my side of the pond there have been Don Whillans (Whillans harness, Whillans Box tent for Himalayan faces), Hamish McInnes (Terrordactyls - the first drop pick ice axes) and Laurent Grivel (12 point crampon) amongst others.
Maybe the greatest climbing hacker was Andrew Irvine (who disappeared high on Everest in 1924 with George Leigh Mallory). Mallory was the greatest climber of his generation, and over the years there has been questioning on why he took the relatively inexperienced Andrew Irvine with him on a summit bid (rather than say the vastly more experienced Neville Odell). But Irvine was an engineering genius. Every night he was rebuilding the oxygen sets, learning from the experience of the previous day to make them better - to give them the oxygen they needed to survive at that altitude.